Christmas Eve

(detail from painting by Giotto di Bernardone,

Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Art in the Christian Tradition)

Outside the open window the air is all awash with angels.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

     –from Love Calls Us to the Things of This World by Richard Wilbur

The reason for the season:

In northern Europe, where the days get the shortest,  solstice festivals were kept with holly and mistletoe and evergreen trees and singing and plays and stories about the promise of spring, for thousands of years before Jesus was born.  As the people there became Christian, the theologians decided this season was the perfect time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, whose actual birthday no one knew.

This joy at the returning of the sun, they said, is the same joy we know in the life Jesus brings .  And this promise of new life, this hope, is what Jesus gave to us and to everyone.  And we understand Jesus, said those early theologians, as filled with the life that creates and keeps on creating the world.   So he’s not a mere ‘reason for the season’.  His is the grace that sustains all living things, born in human form, so that love can bloom.

His birth, in the midst of the reign of Caesar (who even now is the icon for terrible tyrants everywhere) is as portentious as the first day that becomes longer than the day before, and heralds good tidings of life to everyone.

Even in deep darkness, there is light is at work in the world, warmth growing the roots of things.  Politicians may rise and fall, economies wax and wane, but oh!  where would we be if the sun did not return to our days?

This sun, this grace, this mystery, is not won by war or by anyone’s might, is not owned by the rich nor withheld from the homeless, is not dependent on whether you are naughty or nice.  It is not just for Christians, but is equally there for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and people of no faith at all.  Corporations can’t by it, market it, exploit it.  It does not set limits on who can be loved, and by whom, and how much.  It is the hinge on which this world relies.

The magnificent free gift, to which Christmas calls us, given in God’s good time, is so hard to celebrate, rather than the competitive, earned, won, fought for, power filled aspects of life in which we immerse ourselves.   We are invited to become children of this light.  Christmas, like the solstice, is so humble you might miss it, no longer than a minute in visibility, but is the harbinger of all the life of the world.

Jesus, like the sun,  is never extinguished.  His light shines in the darkness.   And the darkness, according to the gospel, does not overcome it.  Truly the air is awash with angels.